Rollergirl is a not-quite-YA book about a girl who signs up for roller derby camp one summer. Her best friend doesn’t. And so, while it is about the awesomeness of roller derby, it’s also about friendship and growing up and growing apart and taking risks and developing who you are. It’s good if you’re 11 or if you have an 11-year-old.
Ana of California is a modern retelling of Anne of Green Gables (one of my favorite childhood books). In this version, she is a Hispanic foster child. The history that she is given – her outlook on the world should be much darker than it is. But optimism is one of Ana/Anne’s signature traits, and it is no different here.
It is not as good as the original. But it is still about family and home and how we make the world we live in. It’s still enjoyable.
Paper Towns is about a girl and a boy who live next door. They aren’t particularly friends, but they used to be. This is, in some ways, about how they become friends again. It’s also about how she takes him on a prank-filled night and then disappears. He decides to find her.
It’s a fun YA story, and it references Whitman a lot. If I were a real book reviewer, I’d’ve gone off and read Leaves of Grass so I could understand those. Alas. It was still enjoyable.
I could pretend that The Code of the Woosters is about making fascists look like idiots – and it is, a teeny-tiny bit. But really its about the goofy adventures of Bertie Wooster, getting engaged to two different young ladies, neither of whom he wants to marry (neither of whom want to marry him, either), and how Jeeves, the amazing butler somehow makes everything better.
All the Jeeves books are fun and light and worth a laugh. Definitely recommended.
Boy Snow Bird is a modern-ish (it takes place in 1950s-60s New England) retelling of Snow White. It covers fairy tales, racism, colorism, and how prejudice makes people do weird, hurtful things. It’s very dreamy and full of people with walls who can’t afford for them to come down.
I would like to read more books by her. Recommended.
The Girl with All the Gifts was not for me. It’s point-of-view is from a super-intelligent girl who also happens to be some sort of zombie-like creature. It is after the zombie apocalypse, as far as I could tell, and what remains of the government has captured a number of young zombies to run experiments on. I got about fifty pages into the book and did not care. So I put it down.
Good Omens is an old favorite.
There is good in the world, and there is evil. God has his agent on earth and so does the Devil. They’ve been here for awhile, influencing events. It becomes time for the apocalypse to come along; it doesn’t quite go the way anyone’s planned. Good Omens is more about the yin and the yang of the world – there has to be evil for there to be good and visa versa. Humans are comprised of both – why would God create the world like that if He or She wanted everyone to be good all the time? Hmmmm?
Recommended.
SPQR is and is not a history of Ancient Rome. It does not cover the entire 1200+ years of the Roman Kingdom, Republic, and Empire. It’s almost more of a media study of Ancient Rome. The fact is that there are few sources, and they’re difficult to verify against each other. In fact, before about 300 BCE, it’s all legend; there are no records of any kind. But we do have the stories, and how people tell the stories say a whole lot about the time they’re writing in.
Augustus burned all of Cleopatra’s records; we don’t get anything of her that didn’t pass through his filter. So what do we know of her? What does that tell us about Augustus, the first emperor of Rome? That’s the kind of history this is – it’s different than others and useful as a result. I thought about Rome differently.
Recommended.
The Orchardist is a lovely story about a man, Talmadge, who runs/owns an apple orchard in central Washington in the late 1800s – early 1900s. It describes a quiet, isolated life that is disrupted when two girls come into the valley. They’re pregnant and they’ve run away from some truly horrible circumstances. The Orchardist describes what happens over the next twenty years in a way that illuminates loneliness, the solitary life, and the weirdness of families. Recommended.
I first learned about Kate Betts from Marketplace. She’s the person they call whenever there’s business news in the fashion world. She always seems very practical, and I enjoy that in my fashion types.
She is a strong, ambitious woman who gets shit done, and My Paris Dream is her memoir chronicling her post-college formative years in Paris, working for W. I need more stories like this one in my life – I admire women like her, who know exactly what they want and go after it. Though her descriptions of the office politics… Oy. W in the late 1980s/early 1990s is not a place I could have worked.
And I like fashion and the odd lifestyles and quirks around it – the weird, small stories that make people in the industry larger-than-life. Kate Betts delivers on those things: a French hunt, the bows in her friend’s hair, and more.
I liked it.